Ilyaxous Photography
Some fifteen years ago, I was a young man hitchhiking through Sub-Saharan Africa. The first six months left me ten kilograms underweight and with a head full of accidental dreadlocks. This is when I made my first photograph that could truly stand on its own. Despite having used a camera for nearly a dozen years, I honestly doubt I had the life experience, or any meaningful appreciation of the world around me to decently create anything. The subject of this first photograph was ostensibly an older Xhosa woman sitting across from me in a train car still labeled for  “Black Use Only.” She and I had been winding our way through the Transvaal for hours, telling stories of our lives, our homelands and our families before I asked if I could take her photo. She agreed, and the process was nearly instantaneous. I honestly cannot remember things like shutter speed or f-stop, only the resolute expression of the tired woman, the sound of her voice in halting English and the smell of that noisy, unheated compartment. In some small way, photography captured this all in a raw two-dimensional form. The next year, when I returned to the United States, I began to go through the hundreds of photographs I had made. Some images began to enucleate experiential memories themselves. I came to appreciate these very few images as relating very distinct stories and my own interpretations of the landscape, of the region’s political transformation and of the personal relationships I made. The revelation of this editing process came from my personal discovery of the power of photography to convey emotion, to offer narrative beyond words and elicit a response in the viewer at a most visceral level. Since then, I have learned to better manipulate materials to compound layers of artifice, consequently, my image making has been made more succinct and idiosyncratic. At the most elemental level, my photography is always about conveying my stories, whether it is elaborately constructed in a computer, a studio or found out in the world; at its best, it is an expressive narrative. Over the years, I have found photography is the medium that best elucidates my interpretations of politics, relationships, emotions and the reality I walk in. The inspiration for a shot may be as simple as a dream or an observation, but the finished image considers the experience gathered every day engaged in this world. After I create my photos they leave the darkroom or printer and are added to some nebulous, ineffable world of human creativity well beyond my own hands. I have not looked for rewards, only the ability to speak more clearly and create a body of work that contributes to a greater collective memory.
 

- Will Swanson